The Clippings File: The Ritz Brothers

Last Friday night at the 92nd Street Y, Jerry Lewis, celebrating his eighty-sixth birthday onstage, was asked whom he learned comedy from. He tossed out two names: the first was Harry Ritz, the second was Milton Berle. The answer likely sent lots of fans (including me) home to Wikipedia and YouTube. Harry Ritz (1907-1986) was the youngest and the most prominent of the three Ritz Brothers, who were a mainstay of movie comedies in the nineteen-thirties. In this 1937 clip from the film “On the Avenue,” they parody Alice Faye; her negligible number (written by Irving Berlin) runs until just past the four-minute mark, and then the comedians take over.

What’s astonishing about their routine is its modernity: it looks like a “Saturday Night Live” skit. In particular, Harry Ritz’s rubbery expressions and oval face foreshadow Will Ferrell. The brothers aren’t types or emblems, as are the Marx Brothers. Rather, their personalities take a back seat to the material, and their teamwork and timing have an acrobatic virtuosity (at times, their rapidity leaves a viewer wondering whether what’s happened isn’t actually about to happen). Yet Harry Ritz, like Berle and Lewis, is a performing fury: he gives the impression of punishing himself with comic exertion, with a tense blend of precision and wild expenditure of energy.

The Marx Brothers, being characters, suggest the drama of comedy: they needn’t do much to evoke a narrative, and, as much as they do, they have a comic economy, leaving something for the next installment. It’s noteworthy that they provided key inspiration to Woody Allen, who is an imprecise physical comedian though, of course, a narrative genius, and someone who, like them, exists between performances and between movies almost as palpably as during them. The Ritz Brothers have no comic identity without their shtick, and so, they perfect it manically—they’re masters of craft; the Marxes, though brilliantly skilled, are masters of being.

P.S. Pauline Kael told me that she preferred the Ritz Brothers to the Marx Brothers but didn’t go into detail about why. In the 1967 essay “Tourist in the City of Youth” (reprinted in the recent Kael anthology, “The Age of Movies”), she says that she prefers them to Marcel Marceau—and then adds,

if I tried to talk in terms of Marceau’s artistry versus Harry Ritz’s artistry, it would be stupid, because “artist” is already too pretentious a term for Harry Ritz and so I would be falsifying what I love him for.

Here’s another sample from the same movie; it’s both insignificant and pretty amazing.